Evolving Technologies

• Produce a project plan to ensure successful delivery and stakeholder satisfaction
• Plan and run projects using best practices in a 6-step project management process
• Implement risk management techniques and mitigation strategies
• Estimate and schedule task work and duration with confidence
• Implement monitoring tools and controls to keep you fully in command of the project
• Recognize and practice the leadership skills needed to run a motivated team

As an effective project manager, you organize scarce resources, work under tight deadlines, control project change and generate maximum team performance. Through a simulated case study, you learn how to successfully plan, manage and deliver projects. You also learn how to implement project management processes, develop leadership skills and respond to real-world scenarios. At the end of the course, you take away templates and checklists for use back at the office.

Individuals who need to strengthen their project management skill sets, those new to project management, or project managers seeking a refresher on fundamental project management knowledge, skills and tools.

Course Outline

• Managing the project processes
• Creating a realistic and achievable plan for the project
• Working within project constraints

• Identifying the project life cycle stages and the key inputs and outputs
• Balancing typical challenges of project management
• Selecting and applying best practices

• Identifying stages of team development
• Building and managing team effectiveness

• Defining clear project objectives
• Determining and clarifying the goals
• Defining key project deliverables
• Running the objective-setting meeting
• Gaining buy-in from stakeholders

• Determining project scope with work breakdown structures (WBS)
• Driving the plan down to task level
• Calculating a first cut of project costs

• Effective ways to produce better estimates
• Three-point estimating to refine accuracy
• Managing the estimating process

• Converting WBS to precedence networks
• Determining the critical path tasks
• Creating dependency diagrams
• Calculating the project duration

• Building clear and readable Gantt charts
• Using slack effectively in the schedule
• Setting key milestones to track and control the project

• Identifying the project risks and assumptions
• Evaluating risk impacts
• Strategies for managing risks
• Managing key risks with the Risk Register
• Reducing risks through contingency plans

• Identifying the resources your project needs
• Assigning resources to tasks
• Analyzing resource use and costs in the schedule
• Optimizing the use of resources
• Preparing and agreeing on task contracts

• Establishing change control procedures
• Presenting the project plan for approval
• Setting the baseline schedule

• Monitoring actual task progress
• Analyzing progress against the baseline
• Correcting the project plan to achieve the objectives
• Picking up warnings of trouble ahead
• Engaging team members to maximize productivity

• Tracking planned vs. actual task performance
• Crashing the critical path tasks
• Analyzing the impact of variation to the baseline plan
• Avoiding the 90-percent-complete trap
• Correcting the schedule

• Communicating project status to stakeholders
• Coping with common project scenarios
• Building ownership, motivation and commitment across the team

• Managing systematic project closedown
• The payoff of post-implementation review
• Documenting project and personal lessons learned for process improvement